SecurityCom: a multi-player game for researching and teaching information security teams

A major portion of government and business organizations' attempts to counteract information security threats is teams of security personnel. These teams often consist of personnel of diverse backgrounds in specific specialties such as network administration, application development, and business administration, resulting in conflicts between security, functionality, and availability. This paper discusses the use of games to teach and research information security teams and outlines research to design and build a simple, team-oriented, configurable, information security game, to study how information security teams work together to defend against attacks using a multi-player game, and to study the use of games in training security teams. Studying how information security teams work, especially considering the topic of shared-situational awareness, could lead to better ways of forming, managing, and training teams. Studying the effectiveness of the game as a training tool could lead to better training for security teams. This work will build off of the successful use of a similar multi-player game for studying deception in groups and teaching network-centric warfare.